FRESHMAN MANDATE

The shooting is over. Freshmen will not troop past the polls today as the by-laws of the Student Council Constitution formerly told them to do. They voted yesterday instead--voted to lock the doors of their polls for this year and perhaps for many years. Briefly, the results are amazing. Pre-election reasoning indicated otherwise: pointed to the belief that, in one swift coup, the Council would gain positive endorsement of its stand for elections and would silence the gnawing criticism which has sporadically arisen in the last few years.

But in spite of the bungling management--and it can only be called bungling when Yardlings are rudely jarred out of their sleep of a Monday morning to decide a matter of such weighty proportions--Freshmen have shown their ability to arrive at the one rational answer. And have answered in such a sweeping manner that none can doubt their conviction, that none can ignore their mandate.

The landslide leads to interesting speculations. There is no reason to believe that the Class of 1942 is more anti-election than previous freshman classes. There is rather contrary evidence if the circulation of last year's abolition petition--which was much wider than that of the present one--means anything at all. In the light of this, it would seem that Yardlings have in the past been driven to the polls against their wills. Just as the Communists would force the workers to be free, the Student Council has forced the Freshmen to be "democratic", and has met all protest with investigations which followed the same lines and reports which repeated the same formulate. Year upon year the Freshmen have indifferently exercised their democratic prerogatives, realizing all along that the forms were a farce.

And as for the future? It would seem best to abolish elections positively and definitely. There will probably be attempts to revive them in some form or other-one proposal being that the Yardlings should elect their Jubilee and Smoker Chairmen, these men to perform a definite function. This eliminates one cardinal objection: that officers were elected as meaningless figure-heads. It still falls before the greater objection that men are necessarily chosen on the basis of a distored, perverted set of values. Perhaps the millenium will arrive when Freshmen awake from their indifference, when they desire democracy earnestly enough to instil a genuine spirit into the forms. Until then, may the last class election at Harvard rest in peace.